A hundred years ago, digging for mummies in the Fayum basin of
Egypt, a workman unearthed the leathery body of a crocodile.

"He pulled it out of the sand," says Anthony S.
Bliss, curator of the Bancroft Library at the University of
California-Berkeley. "He chucked it, just heaved it out of the
way. It must have hit a rock or something because it broke
open and then it was discovered that the crocodile was stuffed
with papyri."

The papyri, which later proved to include royal
proclamations and literature, were being used to help the
crocodile hides maintain their shape during mummification.

Fragments of lost works such as Sophocles's Inachus
were found among the Tebtunis papyri, along with known texts
from Homer, Pindar, and Euripides. The documents from the
January 1900 expedition eventually came to reside at the
University of California-Berkeley.

Now these documents, along with other papyri and
ancient written materials held by a half dozen American
universities and one foreign university, are being recorded
and digitized with NEH support to give worldwide access to
scholars and nonspecialists alike.

At the time they stumbled upon the crocodile
cemetery with its hundreds of mummified crocodiles,
archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt had already
found papyri in the town of Tebtunis, at the temple of the
crocodile god Soknebtunis, and in the cartonnage of more than
fifty human mummies. The Tebtunis find consisted of more than
21,000 fragments, the largest American collection from a
single site.

Over the next hundred years, papyrologists dealt
with the Tebtunis papyri in fits and starts. Three volumes
documenting the collection were published between 1902 and
1933. In 1938 the fragments were transferred to Berkeley,
where they were sandwiched between old issues of the Oxford
Daily Gazetteand placed in tin
boxes. More than thirty years later a fourth volume was
published, followed by another short-lived effort to catalog
and preserve the fragments.

The Berkeley collection languished for years,
waiting for someone to have the time to deal with it, says
Roger S. Bagnall, project director and professor of classics
and history at Columbia University.

"Institutions such as Berkeley and Yale, which both
own significant collections of papyri, had not had a
papyrologist on staff for more than a decade," says Bagnall,
"largely because papyrology has never been a very popular
discipline among classical scholars in the United States. The
classics have always been a very literary field, and
classicists tend to be interested in new literary texts. The
papyri didn't have a payoff for undergraduate teaching. But,
in fact, papyrology was developing a whole new body of
information about parts of the ancient world where Greek was
only one of the cultures."

In recent years, the field has taken a 180-degree
turn, due to the Advanced Papyrological Information System
(APIS), an NEH-funded collaborative project of Columbia
University, Duke University, Princeton University, Berkeley,
the University of Michigan, the Université Livre de Bruxelles,and Yale University. Papyrologists at these
institutions are integrating the holdings from their papyri
collections into a "virtual library" through digital images
and detailed catalog records.

Preservation activities today stand in the position
of the Roman god Janus, says Bagnall. "They look forward to
the astonishing capabilities of new technology and back to
traditional methods of recording and preserving the
intellectual and physical heritage of earlier millennia," he
says. "The APIS project shares this bi-directional character."

He christened the project APIS because of its
reference to the Egyptian god Apis, a sacred bull believed to
be an incarnation of the powerful gods of the underworld and
the sun. Creator of the earth and patron of artisans and
metalworkers, Apis was represented as a mummy.

Most of the activities in the project—such as the
physical conservation of ancient artifacts, the writing and
cataloging in standard library records, and the recording of
images of these objects to reduce wear and tear and preserve
their intellectual contents—are well established, Bagnall
points out. "But APIS moves beyond this, toward the future, by
incorporating a set of standards for imaging, for the formats
of the electronic data generated, and for the linking of the
various sets of electronic data. So the entireproject will be carried out in a way that creates
an integrated information system available over the
Internet." APIS will serve as a single, seamless system.

A number of different materials were used in Egypt
to record everything from high literature to the
communications that make up daily life. Cheaper materials
included wooden tablets and clay ostraca, pieces of broken
pottery. But papyrus was the most important writing material
of the ancientworld.

The plant grew in Nile marshes and was used in
Egypt, Greece, the Middle East, and the Roman Empire from as
far back as 3000 B.C. to the beginning of the European Middle
Ages. The word itself, from which the English word "paper"
comes, is derived from an Egyptian expression meaning "from
thegreat house," referring to the
Pharaonic administration of ancient Egypt.

Papyrus manuscripts were first discovered in
Herculaneum, a ruined city in ancient Italy, in the 1750s.
Over the past three centuries, the modern world has retrieved
such important lost works as the poetry of Sappho, the
comedies of Menander, the Constitution of the Athenians by
Aristotle, and early Christian and Gnostic works.

But nine out of ten published papyri are private
letters or documents—legal and business papers, government
regulations, property records and transactions, petitions to
high officials, tax and rent receipts, bank deposits and
payments, and farm and crop reports, as well as more personal
documents such as letters, horoscopes, and amulets. These
documents reflect the everyday affairs of government,
commerce, and give insight into people's daily lives.
According to Peter van Minnen, who conserved andinterpreted the papyri in Duke's collection, the
texts help reconstruct ancient civilization at large—its
social, economic, political, legal, religious, linguistic,
and even medical history. "Usually, we have only the works
of biased classical authors to tell us what their life was
like," says van Minnen. "Even inscriptions on stone tend to
be written with posterity in mind. Papyri, however, were not
written for us but for the use of the ancients themselves.
This gives them their freshness and directness. Their
interest is even greater when they are part of one and the
same private archive, because in that case we can follow the
ups and downs of a family through several decades,
generations, or even centuries."

There are about a hundred papyri in the Duke
collection from the archive of Ammon, a lawyer from Panopolis
in Upper Egypt. One is a letter written to his mother while he
was on a business trip in Alexandria, in 348 A.D. It is the
longest private letter from the ancient world. In meticulously
writtenGreek, Ammon
describes his efforts to persuade the high priest of Egypt
to appoint his nephew, Horion, as a "prophet" or priest of
the Panopolite Nome.

At the University of Michigan, the archives include
instructions from a Greek gentleman to his wife. "So when you
have received this letter of mine," he writes, "make your
preparations in order that you may come at once if I send for
you. And when you come, bring ten shearings of wool, six jars
of olives, four jars of liquid honey, and my shield, the new
one only, and my helmet. Bring also my lances. Bring also the
fitting of the tent. If you find the opportunity, come here
with good men. Let Nonnos come with you. Bring all our clothes when you come. When you
come, bring your gold ornaments, but do not wear them on the
boat."

A considerable portion of the papyri in Berkeley's
collection once formed part of the archive of Menches, the
komogrammateus, or village secretary, of Kerkeosiris. The
papers contain petitions from villagers who felt wronged and
who petitioned Menches to obtain redress. In 114 B.C., for
example, Haruotes, son of Phaesis, wrote complaining about an
attack upon him in the temple of Isis.

"While I was in the great temple of Isis here for
devotional purposes on account of the sickness from which I am
suffering, on the twenty-third of Pachon of the third year,
Horos son of Haruotes, a resident in the aforesaid temple of
Isis, picked a quarrel with me, and beginning with abuse and
unseemly behavior he at last fell upon me and gave me many
blows with the staff which he was carrying. Therefore, since
in consequence of the blows my life is in danger, I make this
statement to you in order that it may be forwarded by you to
the proper officials and I may have it placed on record, so
that if anything happens to me subsequently, he may not escape
unpunished. Farewell."

Papyrus is a remarkably durable material, more
permanent than rag paper, and far more so than the acidic
paper that has been used since 1850, Bagnall says. "It is of
course much older than most paper manuscripts, and most papyri
are torn on several, if not all, sides. They usually emerge
dirty, crumpled, and twisted, unless they have been preserved
in a box or jar as occasionally happens. Some preliminary
conservation is generally done by dealers or in the field, but
usually full cleaning and straightening is left for laboratory
work in the library, which, until recently, often meant
never."

In restoring and studying papyri, scholars have to
contend with locating missing pieces, handling fragile
materials, and keeping track of all the papyri, which are
often located in any number of collections around the world.

Spurred by these challenges, papyrologists in the
early 1990s began to take note of developments in digital
imaging and the World Wide Web. The University of Michigan,
home to one of the largest collections of papyri in the world,
led the way by establishing a digitization project to make its
collections available on the web through digital images and
catalog records.

"The process of digitization is very simple,"
explains Traianos Gagos. Gagos is an archivist of papyrology
at Michigan and vice president of the American Society of
Papyrologists. "You capture an image of the document with a
flat-bed scanner or, more recently, a digital camera. Then you
upload it to the web, along with its corresponding catalog
record and translation."

Other universities quickly followed Michigan's lead.
From 1992 to 1994, Duke University completed an electronic
archive of its papyrus collection. By 1993, it became clear
that more collections would undertake projects similar to
those at Michigan and Duke. Bagnall, then the president of the
American Society of Papyrologists, saw an opportunity. Under
his leadership, the society created a technology committee to
oversee and coordinate such projects, and establish
methodology and standards for imagecapture and cataloging. This was the birth of
APIS. By the end of 1994, Princeton University, the
University of California at Berkeley, and Yale University
had joined the original consortium.

Since APIS was conceived, large portions of the
collections at the partner institutions have been
conserved—cleaned, straightened, mounted in glass, and stored
in acid-free boxes. Yale and Berkeley have hired full-time
papyrologists to work on the collections. But much work
remains, as most ofthe papyri
in these collections are still unpublished and in some
cases, unexamined.

APIS has already started to transform research and
teaching in papyrology as scholars use digital sources to make
learning a more interactive process. "It has clearly changed
the way we do our research, and thecontent and contextual links that we can now
create between various texts that come from the same ancient
site but belong to different collections around the country
and the globe," Gagos says. "This allows us to expand our
horizon from one or a few texts to a more global view of
texts and archives of common provenance."

Scholars in other fields are becoming more aware of
the rich resources of APIS, Gagos says. "I have received
several messages from graduate students in ancient history,
for instance from as far as Australia, commenting on the
invaluable assistance of APIS in their research."

Gagos has developed and taught courses at the
University of Michigan that require undergraduates to produce
their own online research projects. Gagos's undergraduate
students, in conjunction with his "Egypt after the Pharaohs"
class, created most of the archives on Michigan's Papyrus web
page.

APIS is not just transforming instruction and
research in papyrology; it is making papyrological materials
readily accessible to nonspecialists for the first time. "APIS
is designed to be usable by nonspecialists and can open up
material outside the canon. It allows the full diversity of a
multilingual and multicultural ancient society to be visible
both in text and in images," Bagnall says. "Not everyone was a
Greek or a Roman, not all activities were the sole province of
men, and not everyone was rich."

Paulette W. Campbell is a writer in Burtonsville,
Maryland.

The APIS project has received $609,550 in support
from NEH. The website can be found at
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/projects/digital/apis/ and
more information on the Tebtunis papyri is available at
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/APIS/index.html.